2

When using spellcheck in Thunderbird, I can add a word into custom dictionary, so that Thunderbird does not consider it as misspelling next time.

But how can I do the opposite?

For some reason, Thunderbird believes that "thew" is an English word, and does not mark it as misspelling (underline) it.

"thew" is quite frequent misspelling in my case when I type "the". I checked Cambridge dictionary, and "thew" is not a real word in English.

Why does Thunderbird not correct it? How can I fix this ?

I am using Thunderbird 68 on Debian 10.

I am not sure whether Thunderbird uses aspell or hunspell. I have both installed. How can I check which spellcheck library I am actually using?

EDIT AND UPDATE

The English dictionary in Thunderbird I am using is English (United States).

But regardless whether you consider thew a proper English word or not, this was meant as an example.

I am interested in a solution where I can tell Thunderbird to mark given word as misspelling, where it previously considered it a legit word.

400 the Cat
  • 819
  • 4
  • 37
  • 85
  • "_Thew_" is a real word in English. An unusual one, but a recognised word nonetheless. – roaima Jun 28 '20 at 16:23
  • @roaima - not according to the Cambridge English dictionary – 400 the Cat Jun 28 '20 at 16:39
  • Maybe it's not American, but it's definitely English – roaima Jun 28 '20 at 17:04
  • @Philip Couling - please see my update. – 400 the Cat Jun 29 '20 at 14:12
  • @400theCat Thanks for the clarification. – Philip Couling Jun 29 '20 at 14:18
  • I am afraid you will need to use a custom home made dictionary here... you just need an answer that give an easy way to do it, without unpacking/packing/signing a dict. extension (one plus here can be that you could combine multiple lang while creating your own dict.) – intika Jun 29 '20 at 16:33
  • @intika - or, I need a way to edit the existing dictionary. If it is a plain text file, I would just delete the unwanted lines. – 400 the Cat Jul 01 '20 at 05:13
  • It is plain text but it's zipped and signed; after edit you would need to sign it on the mozilla addon site as a new extension. – intika Jul 01 '20 at 06:30
  • I gave you the exact solution and you still have a bounty for this question. Weird. – Artem S. Tashkinov Jul 01 '20 at 07:13
  • @ArtemS.Tashkinov :D the cat is very rigorous, i am pretty sure he will be bothered by the process of unpacking/repacking/signing beside doing that at each dictionary edit... it's not convenient... a solution that would enforce aspell dictionary or else would be more convenient as the edit would be straightforward. – intika Jul 01 '20 at 08:04

2 Answers2

1

Thunderbird spellcheck can use hunspell dictionaries, you can load them by setting the environment variable DICPATH... hunspell dictionary can be edited with any text editor, by modifying the dic files under /usr/share/hunspell...

  • export DICPATH=/usr/share/hunspell
  • Under preference/composing select the needed dictionary.

Hunspell customisation and man/howto

intika
  • 13,920
  • 7
  • 41
  • 79
0

Mozilla has become really anal about add-ons/extensions nowadays, so the only solution to this would be to use an alpha/trunk version of the browser which allows to install unsigned add-ons, then downloading any dictionary from their servers (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/language-tools/), unpacking it and packing it back as a new add-on without the words you don't like to see. More details here: Your first WebExtension

Alternatively if you don't want the hassle of running trunk, you can try to publish it officially e.g. "English Spelling Dictionary by 400 the Cat".

Marc
  • 11
  • 9
Artem S. Tashkinov
  • 26,392
  • 4
  • 33
  • 64